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I used to repair smartphones for a living, with the majority being iPhones. Back in the 3G and 3GS days, popping those cracked screens and fixing them for $80

I used to repair smartphones for a living, with the majority being iPhones. Back in the 3G and 3GS days, popping those cracked screens and fixing them for $80 was my bread and butter. From what I understand, factories would receive an order from Apple for X units. They would make 10-20% extra, deliver X to Apple, then sell the extra out the back door of the factory. These parts would make their way onto eBay and I would buy them. I still get spam LinkedIn messages 7 years later from cell phone repair parts dealers in China. In my case AFAIK they were legitimate parts, not backwards engineered. Made by the exact same people, just siphoned out of the supply chain.

jsjohnst 8y ago
From my understanding, a lot of that was “slippage” by employees and not the companies intentionally making extra parts. More often than not, they were parts which didn’t pass QC and rather than going through the normal process for those, they just “disappeared”, at least back in those days.
xienze 8y ago
> They would make 10-20% extra, deliver X to Apple, then sell the extra out the back door of the factory. Very common in outsourced manufacturing, it's called a "ghost shift" (contracted orders are made 9-5 and a "ghost shift" works later to produce extras). Presumably Apple wised up to this eventually.
latchkey 8y ago
This happens in the clothing industry as well. I live in Vietnam where a large part of clothes worn in the US are produced. I can buy major name brands anywhere on the street for a fraction of the cost. They even have labels with US price tags on them already. Repairing electronics is also super cheap here. I went from thinking I needed to buy a new device to just realizing that everything can be repaired since the cost of labor is almost nothing here and the parts come directly from China.

jsjohnst 8y ago

From my understanding, a lot of that was “slippage” by employees and not the companies intentionally making extra parts. More often than not, they were parts which didn’t pass QC and rather than going through the normal process for those, they just “disappeared”, at least back in those days.

xienze 8y ago

> They would make 10-20% extra, deliver X to Apple, then sell the extra out the back door of the factory. Very common in outsourced manufacturing, it's called a "ghost shift" (contracted orders are made 9-5 and a "ghost shift" works later to produce extras). Presumably Apple wised up to this eventually.

latchkey 8y ago

This happens in the clothing industry as well. I live in Vietnam where a large part of clothes worn in the US are produced. I can buy major name brands anywhere on the street for a fraction of the cost. They even have labels with US price tags on them already. Repairing electronics is also super cheap here. I went from thinking I needed to buy a new device to just realizing that everything can be repaired since the cost of labor is almost nothing here and the parts come directly from China.